In 2009, I became extremely concerned with the concept of Unique Identity for various reasons. Connected with many like minded highly educated people who were all concerned.
On 18th May 2010, I started this Blog to capture anything and everything I came across on the topic. This blog with its million hits is a testament to my concerns about loss of privacy and fear of the ID being misused and possible Criminal activities it could lead to.
In 2017 the Supreme Court of India gave its verdict after one of the longest hearings on any issue. I did my bit and appealed to the Supreme Court Judges too through an On Line Petition.
In 2019 the Aadhaar Legislation has been revised and passed by the two houses of the Parliament of India making it Legal. I am no Legal Eagle so my Opinion carries no weight except with people opposed to the very concept.
In 2019, this Blog now just captures on a Daily Basis list of Articles Published on anything to do with Aadhaar as obtained from Daily Google Searches and nothing more. Cannot burn the midnight candle any longer.
"In Matters of Conscience, the Law of Majority has no place"- Mahatma Gandhi
Ram Krishnaswamy
Sydney, Australia.

Aadhaar

The UIDAI has taken two successive governments in India and the entire world for a ride. It identifies nothing. It is not unique. The entire UID data has never been verified and audited. The UID cannot be used for governance, financial databases or anything. It’s use is the biggest threat to national security since independence. – Anupam Saraph 2018

When I opposed Aadhaar in 2010 , I was called a BJP stooge. In 2016 I am still opposing Aadhaar for the same reasons and I am told I am a Congress die hard. No one wants to see why I oppose Aadhaar as it is too difficult. Plus Aadhaar is FREE so why not get one ? Ram Krishnaswamy

First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.-Mahatma Gandhi

In matters of conscience, the law of the majority has no place.Mahatma Gandhi

“The invasion of privacy is of no consequence because privacy is not a fundamental right and has no meaning under Article 21. The right to privacy is not a guaranteed under the constitution, because privacy is not a fundamental right.” Article 21 of the Indian constitution refers to the right to life and liberty -Attorney General Mukul Rohatgi

“There is merit in the complaints. You are unwittingly allowing snooping, harassment and commercial exploitation. The information about an individual obtained by the UIDAI while issuing an Aadhaar card shall not be used for any other purpose, save as above, except as may be directed by a court for the purpose of criminal investigation.”-A three judge bench headed by Justice J Chelameswar said in an interim order.

Legal scholar Usha Ramanathan describes UID as an inverse of sunshine laws like the Right to Information. While the RTI makes the state transparent to the citizen, the UID does the inverse: it makes the citizen transparent to the state, she says.

Good idea gone bad
I have written earlier that UID/Aadhaar was a poorly designed, unreliable and expensive solution to the really good idea of providing national identification for over a billion Indians. My petition contends that UID in its current form violates the right to privacy of a citizen, guaranteed under Article 21 of the Constitution. This is because sensitive biometric and demographic information of citizens are with enrolment agencies, registrars and sub-registrars who have no legal liability for any misuse of this data. This petition has opened up the larger discussion on privacy rights for Indians. The current Article 21 interpretation by the Supreme Court was done decades ago, before the advent of internet and today’s technology and all the new privacy challenges that have arisen as a consequence.

Rajeev Chandrasekhar, MP Rajya Sabha

“What is Aadhaar? There is enormous confusion. That Aadhaar will identify people who are entitled for subsidy. No. Aadhaar doesn’t determine who is eligible and who isn’t,” Jairam Ramesh

But Aadhaar has been mythologised during the previous government by its creators into some technology super force that will transform governance in a miraculous manner. I even read an article recently that compared Aadhaar to some revolution and quoted a 1930s historian, Will Durant.Rajeev Chandrasekhar, Rajya Sabha MP

“I know you will say that it is not mandatory. But, it is compulsorily mandatorily voluntary,” Jairam Ramesh, Rajya Saba April 2017.

August 24, 2017: The nine-judge Constitution Bench rules that right to privacy is “intrinsic to life and liberty”and is inherently protected under the various fundamental freedoms enshrined under Part III of the Indian Constitution

"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the World; indeed it's the only thing that ever has"

“Arguing that you don’t care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don’t care about free speech because you have nothing to say.” -Edward Snowden

In the Supreme Court, Meenakshi Arora, one of the senior counsel in the case, compared it to living under a general, perpetual, nation-wide criminal warrant.

Had never thought of it that way, but living in the Aadhaar universe is like living in a prison. All of us are treated like criminals with barely any rights or recourse and gatekeepers have absolute power on you and your life.

Announcing the launch of the # BreakAadhaarChainscampaign, culminating with events in multiple cities on 12th Jan. This is the last opportunity to make your voice heard before the Supreme Court hearings start on 17th Jan 2018. In collaboration with @no2uidand@rozi_roti.

UIDAI's security seems to be founded on four time tested pillars of security idiocy

1) Denial

2) Issue fiats and point finger

3) Shoot messenger

4) Bury head in sand.

God Save India

Thursday, December 9, 2010

929 - Crisis as a way to build a global totalitarian state - RT

Published: 20 April, 2009, 13:03
Edited: 14 November, 2009, 



As the world financial and economic crisis comes into its own, the Western community leaders are seeking to impress on mankind the idea that this upheaval will end up ‘turning the world into something different’.
 
Even though the picture of the 'new world order’ remains vague and fuzzy, the main idea is quite clear: A single global government, goes the argument, has to be established if we don’t want general chaos to prevail.
 
Every now and again, Western politicians mention the need for a ‘new world order’, a ‘new world financial architecture’, or some kind of ‘supranational control’, calling it a ‘New Deal’ for the world. Nicolas Sarkozy was the first to say so, while addressing the UN General Assembly in September 2007 (that is, before the crisis).
 
During the February 2009 meeting in Berlin convened to prepare the G20 summit, this was echoed by Gordon Brown, who said that a worldwide New Deal was needed. We are conscious, he added, that where the world financial flows were concerned, we would not be able to emerge from this situation with the help of purely national authorities alone. 

We need the authorities and world watchdogs to make the activities of financial institutions operating in the world markets totally open to us. Both Sarkozy and Brown are protégés of the Rothschilds.
 
Statements made by certain representatives of ‘the global elite’ indicate that the current crisis is being used as a mechanism for provoking some deepening social upheavals that would make mankind – plunged as it is already into chaos and frightened by the ghost of an all-out violence – urge of its own free will that a ‘supranational’ arbitrator with dictatorial powers intervene into the world affairs.
The events are following the same path as the Great Depression in 1929-1933: a financial crisis, an economic recession, social conflicts, establishing totalitarian dictatorships, inciting a war to concentrate power, and capital in the hands of a narrow circle. This time, however, the case in point is the final stage in the ‘global control’ strategy, where a decisive blow should be dealt to the national state sovereignty institution, followed by a transition to a system of private power of transnational elites.
 
As early as the late 1990s, David Rockefeller, author of the idea of private power that is due to replace the governments, said that we (the world) were on the threshold of global changes. All we need, he went on, is some large-scale crisis that will make people accept the new world order.
 
Jacques Attali, Sarkozy’s adviser and former EBRD chief, claimed that the elites had been incapable of dealing with the currency problems of the 1930s. He was afraid, he said, that a similar mistake would be made again. At first we’ll wage wars, he went on, and let 300 million people perish. After that reforms will follow and a world government. Shouldn’t we better think about a world government already at this stage, he asked?
 
The same was stated by Henry Kissinger: In the final analysis, the main task is to define and formulate the general concerns of the majority of countries, as well as of all leading states with regard to the economic crisis, considering the collective fear of a terrorist jihad. Next, all of that should be converted to a common action strategy… Thus, America and its potential partners are getting a unique chance for turning the moment of the crisis into a vision of hope.
 
The world is being led to accept the “new order” idea step by step to avoid provoking events that are likely to make the universal protests against the worsening conditions of human existence take ‘a wrong course’ and become uncontrolled. The main thing that Stage One managed to achieve was to start a wide-ranging discussion on ‘global government’ and the ‘inadmissibility of protectionism’ with an emphasis on the ‘hopelessness’ of the national-state models for emerging from the crisis.
 
This discussion is proceeding against the background of information pressures that help to build up human anxieties, fear, and uncertainty. Some of those information actions are the following: WTO forecasts to the effect that 1.4 billion people are likely to sink below the poverty line in 2009; a warning by the WTO director general that the biggest world trade slide in postwar history is in the offing; a statement by the IMF’s Dominique Strauss-Kohn (a protégé of Sarkozy’s) that a world economic crash is impending unless a large-scale reform of the financial sector of the world economy is implemented, and a crash that is most likely to bring in its wake not only social unrest but also a war.
Against this background, the idea to introduce a common world currency as a cornerstone of the ‘new world order’ was put forward. The real masterminds of this long-standing project are as yet in the shadow. Let us note that some or other representatives of Russia are pushed to the fore. This is reminiscent of the situation before World War I, where the Anglo-French circles that possessed some well-elaborated plans for a new division of the world instructed the Russian Foreign Minister to draw up a general program for the Entente Cordiale. It went down in history as the ‘Sazonov program’, even though Russia did not play an independent role in that war and was from the start built into the system of interests of the British financial elite.
 
On March 19, Henry Kissinger came to Moscow as a member of The Wise Men (James Baker, George Schultz, and others), who had meetings with the Russian leaders before the G20 summit. Dmitry Trenin, director of the Moscow Carnegie Center and participant in the latest US meeting of the Bilderbergers, called that meeting a ‘positive signal’. On March 25, Moskovsky Komsomolets published an article ‘The Crisis and the World Problems’, by Gavriil Popov (currently President of the International Union of Economists) that openly voiced what was normally discussed behind closed doors.
 
The article mentioned World Parliament, World Government, World Armed Forces, World Police Force, World Bank, the necessity of placing under international control the nuclear weapons, nuclear power generating capacities, the entire amount of space rocket technology, and the planet’s minerals, the imposition of birth-rate limits, the cleansing of humanity’s gene pool, the fostering of people intolerant to cultural and religious incompatibility, and the like.
 
The “countries that will not accept the global prospects,” says Popov, “must be expelled from the world community.”
 
Of course, the Moskovsky Komsomolets article conveys nothing new that would enable one to understand the strategy of the global elite. Another thing is important. The establishment of a totalitarian police order and the elimination of national states is being suggested as an open program of action, and what both the liberals, and the socialists, and the conservatives always viewed as ‘new fascism’ is being recommended as the only possible salutary path for the whole of mankind. Someone wants the discussing of these projects to become a norm. In this context, some ‘particularly trusted’ representatives of Russia are pushed to the fore, Russia that will become the main victim of the policy of total plunder should the ‘global government’ become a reality.
 
The G20 did not discuss the common world currency issue, since time had not yet come for that. The summit itself was a step forward on the way to chaos, because its decisions, if followed blindly, will only worsen the world socioeconomic situation and, to quote Lyndon LaRouche, will “finish off the patient.”
 
In the meantime, the crisis is being exacerbated, and analysts are predicting an era of mass-scale unemployment. The most pessimistic predictions come from LEAP/Europe 20201, which regularly publishes them in its bulletins and even set them out in an open letter sent to the leaders of the Twenty before the London summit.
 
As early as February 2006, LEAP was surprisingly precise in describing the prospects for the ‘systemic global crisis’ as a consequence of the financial illness caused by the US debt. LEAP analysts are viewing the current events in the context of the general crisis that began in the late 1970s and is now in its fourth, final and most grave stage, the so-called ‘elutriation phase’, where the collapse of real economy begins. According to LEAP’s Frank Biancheri, it is not simply a recession but the end of the system, in which its main pillar, the US economy, collapsed. “We are witnessing the end of an entire epoch before our own eyes.”
 
The crisis may lead to some most difficult consequences. LEAP forecasts a rise in unemployment to 15-20% in Europe and as much as 30% in the United States. If the key dollar problem fails to be solved, the world events will take a most dramatic turn. The dollar collapse may take place as early as July 2009, and the potentially decades-long crisis will trigger off “a world-wide geopolitical disintegration” with social upheavals and civil conflicts, with the division of the world into separate blocs, with the world coming back to Europe’s1914, with military clashes, etc. The most powerful popular unrest will take place in countries with the least developed social security systems and the biggest concentrations of weapons, primarily in Latin America and the United States, where social violence is already now manifest in the activities of armed gangs. Experts note the beginning of US population fleeing to Europe, where the direct threat to life is for the time being not so great. Aside from armed conflicts, LEAP analysts forecast power, food and water shortages in areas dependent on food imports.
LEAP experts describe behavior demonstrated by the Western elites as absolutely inadequate: "Our leaders have failed to understand what happened, and show the same amount of incomprehension to this day. We are amid a period of protracted recession, and it was necessary to engage in introducing some long-term measures to cushion the blows, whereas our leaders still hope to avoid a prolonged recession… All of them have been formed around the American pillar and cannot see that the pillar is a shambles…"
 
But this is not seen by the mid-level leaders, while the top-level world managers are, on the contrary, informed quite well; it is they who are implementing the ‘controlled chaos’ and general disintegration policy, including a civil war and the disintegration of the United States planned for the end of 2009, a scenario that is being widely discussed both by American and world media.
 
On the threshold of conflicts planned in various areas of the planets, a system is being established that will give a supranational center relying on a large-scale punitive machine total political, military, legal, and electronic control over the population. That system uses the network management principle that allows embedding into any society parallel structures of authority that report to external decision-making centers and are legalized through the doctrine of prevalence of international law over national law. The shell remains national, while real power becomes transnational. Jacques Attali calls this a ‘global law-based state’.
 
The ruling center of the global law-based state is located in the US. While its fundamentals began to emerge in the 1990s, the fight against terrorism after the 9/11 events has lead to radically new phenomena. The passing of the 2001 Patriot Act not only allowed security services to control the American population and suspected foreigners, but also accelerated the passing of state responsibilities into the hands of transnational corporate structures.
 
Intelligence activities, trade of war, penitentiary system, and information control are passing into private hands. This is done through so-called outsourcing, a relatively new business phenomenon that consists of trusting certain functions to private firms that act as contractors and relying on individuals outside an organization to solve its internal tasks.
 
In 2007, the American government found out that 70% of its secret intelligence budget is spent on private contracts and that “Cold-War intelligence bureaucracy is transforming into something new, where contractor’s interests dominate.” For American society (Congress included), their activities remain classified, which allows them to gather more and more important functions in their hands.
 
Former CIA employees say that nearly 60% of their staff are on contracts. Those people analyze most of the information, write reports for those who make decisions in state authorities, maintain communications among various security services, help foreign stations, and analyze data interception. As a result, America’s National Security Agency is becoming more and more dependent on private companies that have access to classified information. No wonder, then, that it is lobbying a bill in the Congress that is supposed to guarantee immunity to corporations that have worked with NSA for the last five years.
 
The same is happening to private military companies (PMCs), which have been assuming more and more army and police functions. On a significant scale, it started in the nineties in former Yugoslavia, but contract workers were especially widely used in Afghanistan and other conflict zones. They did the ‘dirtiest’ actions, as was the case during the war in South Ossetia, where up to 3000 mercenaries were involved. At the moment, PMCs are real armies, each up to 70,000 strong, that operate in over 60 countries, with annual revenues of up to $180 billion (according to Brookings Institution, USA) For example, over 20,000 employees of American PMCs work in Iraq along with the 160,000 American military contingent.
 
The system of private prisons is also growing rapidly in the US. The prison industry complex, which uses slave labor and sweatshop practices, is flourishing, and its investors are based on Wall Street. The use of convict labor by private corporations has been legalized in 37 states already, and it is used by major corporations such as IBM, Boeing, Motorola, Microsoft, Texas Instrument, Intel, Pierre Cardin, and others. In 2008, the number of inmates in US private prisons was about 100,000, and it is growing rapidly, along with the total number of inmates in the country (mostly African-Americans and Latin Americans), which is 2.2 million people, or 25% of all convicts in the world.
 
After Bush came to power, privatization of the system for transportation and retention of migrants in concentration camps began. In particular, a branch of the notorious firm Halliburton, Kellog Brown and Root (once headed by Dick Cheney), did just that.
 
The biggest achievements have been made over the last few years in the area of establishing electronic control over people’s identities, carried out under the pretext of counterterrorism. Currently, the FBI is creating the world’s biggest database of biometric indexes (fingerprints, retina scans, face shapes, scar shapes and allocation, speech and gesture patterns, etc.) that now contains 55 million fingerprints. The latest novelties include the introduction of body scanning system in US airports, tracking of literature read by passengers in flight, and so on. A new opportunity to gather detailed information on people’s private lives follow from the NSA Directive N59, passed in summer 2008, ‘Identification and tracking biometry for the purpose of strengthening national security’, and the classified 

‘Homeland Terrorism Preparedness Law’.
Evaluating the policy of America’s authorities, ex-Congressman and 2008 presidential candidate Ron Paul said that America is gradually turning into a fascist state, “We are approaching not a Hitler-type fascism, but one of a softer type, which shows in the loss of civil freedoms, when corporations rule everything and… the government lies in the same bed with big business.” May we remind you that Ron Paul is one of the few American politicians speaking for the closing of the Federal Reserve System as a secret unconstitutional organization?
 
With Obama’s coming to power, the police order in America is getting tighter and tighter in two directions – strengthening internal security and militarization of civilian institutions. Tellingly, having condemned the infringements on individual freedoms done by the Bush administration, Obama has put his own staff under total control by making them fill out a 63-question form that touches upon the most intricate details of their private lives. In January, the US President signed bills that enable the continuation of the illegal practice of abducting people, keeping them secretly in prisons, and moving them to countries where tortures are used. He also proposed a bill called National Emergency 

Help Center Establishment Act, which stipulates the establishment of six such centers in US military bases to provide help to people who are displaced due to an emergency situation or disaster and thus get into military jurisdiction. Analysts connect this bill with possible disturbances and consider it proof that the US administration is preparing for a military conflict which may follow after the provocation that is being planned.
 
The American system of police control is actively implemented in other countries, primarily in Europe – through the establishment of American law hegemony on its territory by means of closing various agreements. A big part here was played by US–European talks out of the glare of publicity on creation of the common ‘area of control over the population’ that were held in spring 2008, when the European Parliament adopted resolution that ratified creation of the single transatlantic market abolishing all barriers to trade and investments by 2015. The talks resulted in the classified report prepared by the experts from six participating countries. This report described the project to create the ‘area of cooperation’ in the spheres of ‘freedom, safety and justice’.
 
The report dwells upon the reorganization of the system of justice and internal affairs of the EU member states in such a manner that it would resemble the American system. It concerns not only the ability to transfer personal data and cooperation of police services (which is already being carried out), but also, for example, extradition of EU immigrants to US authorities in accordance with the new mandate that abolished all the guarantees the European procedure of extradition provided. In the US the Military Commissions Act of 2006 is in force, and it allows persecution or imprisonment of any person who is identified as an ‘illegally fighting enemy’ by the executive authorities and extends to immigrants from any country not at war with the US. They are persecuted like “enemies” not based on some evidence but because they were labeled so by the governmental agencies. No foreign governments have protested against this law which is of international importance.
 
Soon they will sign the agreement on personal data communication, in accordance with which the American authorities will be able to obtain such personal information as credit card numbers, bank account details, investments, travel routes or communication via Internet, as well as the information concerning race, political and religious beliefs, habits, etc.. It was under the US pressure that the EU countries have introduced biometric passports. The new EU regulation implies the overall switch of EU citizens to electronic passports from the end of June 2009 by 2012. New passports will contain a chip with not only passport info and a photo, but also fingerprints.
 
We are witnessing the creation of the global electronic concentration camp, and crisis, conflicts and wars are used to justify it. As Douglas Reed wrote “people tend to tremble in the face of an imaginary danger and are too lazy to see the real one.”